A recent Yahoo study reported that four percent of Internet users have jumped on the RSS bandwagon and begun subscribing to syndicated feeds.

Considering the number of ways that web publishers show their readers they offer feeds, it's amazing we've gotten that many:

In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, the next versions of the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers will identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon used in Mozilla Firefox. Since the market share of these browsers tops 95 percent, the icon will become the de facto standard for syndication overnight when the next version of Microsoft Windows comes out later this year.

In October, Jane Kim of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team explained what they were looking for when selecting a feed icon for the browser:

It conveys the important attributes of feeds: newness, activity, subscription, and continual information.

It builds on the most consistent and identifiable element used to represent feeds today: the orange rectangle.

It avoids the use of text. Icons that have text do not generally work well for a global audience. For example, an icon with the text "FEED" may be cryptic to users whose primary language is non-Latin based. Text is very important to support an icon (in tool-tips or accompanying text). In English, we will be using the verb "subscribe" fairly widely whenever text is appropriate.

Microsoft ultimately chose Stephan Horlander's Firefox icon -- with permission -- and will use it in all of its software.

The RSS Advisory Board should officially support the common feed icon, adopting the symbol on its own site and encouraging its use on web sites, browsers, and syndication software.

As technology reaches mass adoption, the technical details that matter so much to dorks like me fade into the background. This is already beginning to happen with syndication, in spite of several years of "tastes great/less filling" between advocates of different formats.

In Internet Explorer 7, two words are completely absent from all places where Microsoft tells users how to read their favorite web sites using syndication -- RSS and Atom:

The benefits of syndication are still a hard sell for non-technical people, seven years after Dan Libby of Netscape published the first format called RSS. The use of a common icon and jargon-free language like "subscribe to a feed" have the potential to make things considerably easier.

The link at upper right is promoting the RSS Advisory Board site, which has a Google pagerank of 0 because we had to start a new domain with no benefit of redirects. I'm doing it on a couple of sites to call attention to the board.

It is quite understandable that the current chair of the RSS Advisory Board would want to promoting the RSS Advisory Board site, whether it be to Google or to all visitors. I never questioned that.

I'm questioning both the use of one common icons in an unexpected way, and the promotion of another soon to be common icon in ways that dillute the common meaning that IE and Mozilla seem to be giving it.

The information that a consermer needs to know is what is the url of the feed. That same information pertains regardless of how they read the feed. I think that the common semantics of this icon should be to a hyperlink to the feed.

There are almost as many different methods of subscrition as there are feed readors. I doubt that we can use this icon as a subscription button without contributing even more confusion. I think that all agents that subscribe to the feed from a page should use the autodiscovery links and and not rely upon a button. These should rapidly evolve into javascript tool bar gadgets like lots of us use for bloglines.

As was Sam, I was criticized for using the new feed icons. I argued then--and now--that the web is an application. If the icon is supposed to represent the "subscribe" action (rather, the clicking on which means the outcome of subscribing to the feed), then I think I'm actually in the clear, since my site uses the Syndication Subscription Service combined with Phil Ringnalda's clever Javascript code which, while allowing people to right click and copy the URL, sends those who click to instructions on how to use the feed.

I posted a similar observation that in my travels around the blogs that interest me, I've seen a huge growth in the number of sites adopting the Mozilla Firefox feed icon. As your graphic illustrates well, for novice users it can be very confusing and frustrating what all these versions of links and buttons represent. I'm all for uniformity and consistency, so cheers to the IE7 team for getting the ball rolling, and as you point out Opera has since fallen in. I'd like to see that 4% grow to more like 20 in 2006. That may be a little optimistic, but you never know with trends. More at De Facto RSS Feed Icon Spreading Like Wildfire.

Thanks for very interesting article. btw.
I really enjoyed reading all of your posts.
It's interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else's
point of view ... makes you think more. So please keep up the great work.
Greetings.

Thank You for another very interesting article.
It's really good written and I fully agree with You
on main issue, btw. I must say that I really enjoyed
reading all of Your posts. It's interesting to read ideas,
and observations from someone else's point of view ... it makes
you think more. So please try to keep up the great work all the time.
Greetings

Want to finally find out what RSS really is without needing to read a technical treatise? Tired of feeling left out of the RSS party? Interested in spending less than 5 minutes to understand what RSS is all about, why...

Two years down the line and this has definitely taken off used everywhere I go. I've only gotten into RSS feeds in the last year, and so I just took it for granted that that was the image to represent it. I never knew that it had a whole lot of decisions to go before everyone decided on a logo. Don't ask me how I thought a logo did come about I mean, I didn't even consider it. Strange how that happens...